Kelly connects with Nir Halevy, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. His research on influence, power, status, and leadership has appeared in top scientific journals and has been featured in numerous media outlets including The Economist, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, BusinessWeek, CNN, and MSNBC. He has a new book, “Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broke and How to Fix Them.”  

You have a chapter on the subject of relatedness in your book where you interview folks in an improv troupe. 

“There is a visceral element of experiencing the ‘Yes, And’ that’s profoundly different from  hearing a ‘no.’ And we know this based on our own feelings. I think feelings are information often. I learned several other things from the interviews with improv performers, for example, that you can treat life as a shared story that you’re telling with other people, right? There is a narrative that’s being created and negotiated and kind of co-created, and that’s an experience of shared leadership, right? So, I think we can sit on stage, we can sit in life. They also talked about the experience of like walking on a tightrope together with other people. Usually when we think about a circus performance, we think about one or two people doing this, but in a great improv show, you might see six people doing this tightrope walk together. And that’s  pretty remarkable to be able to see this in in real time. So, really, they taught me a lot of different things about how to create and sustain long-term relatedness within a company.” 

Your book is about hierarchies, but I couldn’t help but think about status and how often high status people often don’t know that they are operating in high status ways. 

“Yeah. I think you make a really good point that people from the top don’t experience the hierarchy or their status in the quite the same way as people from the bottom, right? So, it doesn’t look and feel the quite the same way. And it’s important to sometimes actually remember that. And there is real interesting research done by a lot of different people on the differences between power and status. High status people are actually on average better than high power people in taking other people’s perspectives. There is a sense of noblesse oblige. You’re getting respect, you’re getting admiration, you’re reciprocating by giving generous advice and kind of being helpful to people and so on. Whereas powerholders are often self focused. It’s about control, it’s about hoarding resources. so, it’s a little different in terms of their engagement. And hierarchies obviously have both power and status as fundamental elements.” 

You have a study of 911 operators who use humor to get higher status police to respond to them. Why do you think that works? 

“I think a lot of things are happening when people laugh. And you’re the expert. So, let me know if that resonates, right? I think one thing is people are a little bit more vulnerable, right? They don’t monitor how they come across. They’re also acknowledging a gift that they just received. They received a gift from someone/ Someone entertained them and kind of I tell you that you’re competent, right? By making all of us laugh, by participating in this.”

Photo Credit: Tal Halevy